Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In his first book, Hard times in the hometown, Martin Dusinberre wrote how his chosen research subject of Kaminoseki, a town in coastal Yamaguchi prefecture, was not just the site of local history, but 'was also a site of global history, in which the lived experiences of the townspeople regularly traversed the borders of municipality, region, or nation'. 1 He showed us that it was not just these lived experiences that tied the town and townspeople of Kaminoseki to scales of history beyond the local or national, but the built environment also.Kaminoseki's overseas migrants, who left the town in the Meiji period (1868-1912) for Hawai'i, Korea, and California, built houses, endowed schools and shrines, and constructed commemorative stones to carve their beneficence into their hometown's landscape.In Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories, Dusinberre takes up the built environment of migrant hometowns once again, as one example of a 'non-traditional' and global archive which offers historians new perspectives on the worlds of those Japanese migrants who, in the late nineteenth century -the book mainly deals with the 1880s and 1890s -left economically marginalized and declining hometowns like Kaminoseki.They sought new opportunities in a world being swiftly connected by steamships, undersea telegraph cables, global networks of mail, and unified understandings of time.One of these steamships, the Yamashiro-maru, acts as the book's throughline of sorts.However, this will not be an archival journey of plain sailing and calm seas.
Source: The Historical Journal
Author: Hannah Shepherd
Institution: Yale University
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7165049906
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